201 - We're at peace, then

So, Chevenga—I’m sorry. I should use that other name, that came from your mother. Virani-e. It just sounds… wrong on you… I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly know you as anything but Chevenga. Sorry, lad.

I grit my teeth and girded my mental loins and went to seek Niku. She keeps to her rooms a lot now. The babies have dropped; she looks like she’s about to pop any day now. I ran into her in the corridor. “Oh!” she said, when I told her I wanted to speak with her. “Shadow-father-in-marriage, I was just looking for you. How may I help you?”

“I’m not asking for help. I just need to speak… somewhere private.” Your little hellions have ears everywhere, shadow-son. Ikal couldn’t do better.

“All right. Why don’t we go up to the music room. There’s no one in earshot up there.” We walked there together in a bit of a tense silence, and sat down among the drums and Lakan stringed things and Arkan stringed things and flutes and rattles. I wonder why she wanted it to be there?

“What I wanted to say was…” I couldn’t say it smoothly, lad. “Em… it’s about… um… what happened in the war…. I… em… I should say something to you about it.”

She looked at me with those big black eyes and her brown forehead darkened browner, the way it does when her brows go down, with confusion. “Shadow-father-in-marriage, a lot of things happened in the war. If it’s about the… um. When… um, er…” Well. I wasn’t the only one who was going to trip over my tongue.

“When you and I, um, you know.”

“When we started by sparring and ended up trading real blows.”

“Yes.”

There was this silence, big and long and deep enough to drop a largish walled town into.

I set my teeth. I’m going to say it, I told myself. I’m going to say it now. For Chevenga’s happiness, for my family, because it is right. I’m going to say it, and not care if she doesn’t say the same. Not care if I win or lose. That is not the point. I… apologize, Niku. What I did was wrong. I am sorry. No, there’s a better way of wording it. For what I did, I am truly sorry. It was a very bitter mistake. No, no. Niku, I am sincerely apologetic for what—

“Shadow father-in-marriage…” She was a little breathless, as if she were scared. But you know how she gets that kind of decisiveness when she’s scared, like, I’ve got to overcome it by doing something right now…? “Thank you for actually bringing it up… I came to tell you… I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about raising my hand against a possible family member, and someone Chevenga loves so much.” All-Spirit, tears welled up in her eyes. “I feel like a total shit thinking about it!”

Lad, you know when you go fishing and you hook up a nice big one and it’s lying on the ground with its mouth kind of flopping open and closed and its eyes bugging and glassy? I know I looked exactly like that.

I fumbled for a kerchief, found one, passed it to her. “Uhh… well… um… I meant to… you needn’t feel like a total shit. No more than me, anyway. Less, really, since I made the challenge. I… was coming to apologize to you.”

She looked up at me. Second hooked fish, mouth opening and closing, eyes buggy. “Uh… really… you were? I… I thought I’d dragged my feet enough talking to you… I’m so crabby when I’m pregnant I didn’t think I could do a sincere apology justice and I really… um… thought you wanted me dead rather than with Chevenga…”

Well, of course she did. Why wouldn’t she? “No, no, I didn’t want you dead. I just wanted to, em… humble you. For which I apologize, I should never have done such a thing.”

“I… uh… suppose…” She took a deep breath, as if Surya was telling her to. “My war teachers tried to get me to realize I’d a problem with pride… I… accept your apology if you… accept mine. It was a pride thing… for that I’m sorry too. I was afraid… you’d want to keep humbling me if I admitted fault. I really do want to be able to talk to you, more than ‘please pass the salt.’ It’s hurting the whole family.”

“Yes, it is,” I had to agree. “And none of us need it now. None of us need it ever. Of course, I’ll accept yours. Niku…” I made the apology gesture with both my hands.

She took them, and said in a very formal way, like these tribal people can do so well, “I truly accept your apology. I’ll do my best not to step on your toes with too many… Niah things.” We let go hands, and she flipped hers over and did the apology gesture to me. “I am sorry I hurt you.”

I said, “I accept.” I also decided it was about time I did this: kissed her hand and said, “Thank you… as Chevenga’s shadow-father… for being the one who was willing to marry him despite… you know.”

She twitched, almost pulling away. Even now, lad, people who kept the secret aren’t used to talking about it openly, and people who didn’t, not at all. “You’re welcome… I always thought he was worth every instant I could have with him, and now… well.” Her face broke into a beaming smile. “Everything is good.”

“We’re at peace, then,” I said. My heart was in my throat, for some reason, shadow-son, as I slowly, tentatively, opened my arms.

She whomped into them like a battering ram into a gate, and hers smacked around me so hard it hurt.

“Shadow-daughter-in-law!”

“Shadow-father-in-marriage!” Now we were both in tears.

We laughed and cried together, until she pointed out that perhaps we should let everyone know I hadn’t given her a smashed-over-the-head drumhead collar and she hadn’t beat out the Paean Against Arko on my skull with the sticks.

You see why I had to write you immediately.

All my love, which feels so much bigger these days,

Esora-e.

†

So, Piatsri, to continue:

Mer’s right, of course. I should do it. And I shouldn’t even wait. It’s been, what… six years.

And… I feel like a shit for this, too. I’ve been thinking in the back of my mind that it doesn’t matter whether I apologize to Esora-e because… the person I really want to do it for isn’t going to be around much longer.

But he is, now.

So I heave myself up off the couch in the sun-room, and beat the parrots off me so they won’t follow me and keep interrupting while I’m trying to tell him, and head waddling down towards his room. And who should I run into in the corridor. “Oh—Esora-e!” I say. “May I speak with you?”

He looks tense for some reason, I notice. “You… no, I need to speak to you,” he says, in his gruff way. “Somewhere private.”

Well, fine. What’s this about? I swallow the bit of anger. What’s he done, really? Besides, I can’t apologize angry. “All right,” I said. “Why don’t we go up to the music room? There’s no one in earshot up there.” And you’re less likely to try and hit me with a drum, I think.

We go up, neither of us wanting to say anything.

“Shadow-father-in-marriage,” I say. “I want to speak about… what happened in… the… um… er… ehh… war.” All of a sudden I’m as stumble-tongued as a girl first asking a boy to make love to her.

“What… happened… in… the… em… war?” He’s as stumbled-tongued as the boy. “You mean… when we…”

“Yes,” I grit my teeth and say. “When we sparred and it turned into a real fight.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Yuh,” he says.

“Look, shadow-father-in-marriage—” You know me, Piatsri. Once I decide to say something, I rush into it, with a bunch of words. “Thank you for bringing it up, I—”

“I’m sorry!” he blurts out, like it’s been wanting to burst out from behind his teeth for ages.

You know how when you spear a fish, it stares at you with these eyes that are white all around, and the mouth that is gaping open so big it is big as its face? I must have looked exactly like that right then.

“Uh… you are?” I say. “No, I am!”

“You are?” he says. “I… look… let me say it, I’ve been planning the words… I… was meaning to humiliate you. Which was wrong. I should never have done such a thing. I apologize, sincerely.”

“I’m sorry for my half,” I said. “I’m truly sorry that I raised my hand against family member, and someone Chevenga loves so much. And I’m sorry I took so long to say I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry I took just as long as you did.”

“I… was afraid you’d keep wanting to humiliate me, if I admitted fault by saying sorry,” I tell him. “But… I really want to say more to you than ‘please pass the salt.’ I… accept your apology if you’ll accept mine.”

“I will accept yours if you accept mine.” He gives me his hands in the formal Yeoli way that means apology, holding them low and a little apart and palms turned up, as if to offer something. I take them, which means I accept his apology. And then we do the same the other way around. And he kisses my hands—that’s the formal Yeoli thank-you—for being willing to marry Chevenga when I thought it would only be for a short time.

“We’re at peace, then?” he says. I say yes, and we hug. He has not a bad hug for a Yeoli, reserved as they are. And we both cry, with relief. Why did we wait for so long to do this? Were we both idiots or what?

Everything’s so good, Piatsri.

More next time.

Lots of love from your friend forever,

Niku

†

It was just as Tyaicha had said; even after I’d found the will to get out of bed, I was back in with sickness for about half the time. Heat, chills, aches, rashes, nose running like a river and throat in agony: I got all of it. Once while I was staring at the ceiling, too weak to do anything else, I remembered what Surya had said, that he’d got everything that was going around and more, leading up to his going asa kraiya. “I don’t have a case of illness, but a case of change, I know,” I said to Azaila, when he told me he had no intention of being any easier on me because of it. “Surya told me what you told him.” But for Surya it had been entirely cured the moment he’d laid down the sword; why for me was it happening after? At least the idleness wouldn’t give me flab after all; I was eating like a bird, having no appetite.

Twenty-one days of my twenty-eight were gone when I got an awful chilly fever that tore up my throat and laid me absolutely flat. It didn’t help that I was beginning to worry about how I’d get to Vae Arahi for the referendum count; the weather had been so mild that the lake was only just beginning to freeze at the edges, and whether it got thick enough to walk safely in time depended entirely on how cold the nights got. A sky full of thick wet clouds every day boded ill. “Look, Kaninjer always just gives me something by the symptoms, whatever the kyashin cause,” I said to Tyaicha in a scrap of moaning voice, the best I could do. “Please!…?” He just stroked my brow and said, “Nothing but water. Trust me, no Haian remedy would touch this. It’s not really sickness, it’s—”

“Change, I know, go eat kyash.” I pulled the covers over my head.

That night, weapon-sense tweaked me out of sleep, like a scratch on the skin of my mind. It was pitch-dark, the death-hour in the death-time of year, when people light many lights just to see light, and a particularly dark night even for then, with no moon and stars clouded over. Just inside the entrance of the maesa asa kraiya, three blades moved, those who carried them creeping silently into the corridor.

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